Adobe Completes Acquisition of Macromedia

December 7th, 2005 at 9:21 pm by Sam
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On Monday, Adobe released a press release that it had completed its acquisition of Macromedia, Inc. on December 3rd, 2005. This week, they’re starting to actually integrate their product suites, Creative Studio and Studio 8.

So today, it’s time for us to reflect on a few of Macromedia’s crowning achievements…

They single-handedly destroyed ColdFusion after purchasing it from Allaire by forsaking the “small, robust footprint” mentality and adding an antisocial, schizophrenic feature set which didn’t like to get along with itself. This they did instead of fixing its core issue: instability, which prevented its widespread proliferation and acceptance in Enterprise environments. Not to be outdone, they eventually scrapped CF, and released a new “MX” — no doubt a short-hand version George Carlin’s sixth dirty word, adopted by its developers who typed “I hate this new mx!!” in company e-mail — version based on Sun’s ill-gotten, red-headed, bastard-child: JavaServer…

Machine after machine has succumbed to the quagmire that is Macromedia Studio: an obese application which insists on digesting more than its share of the file types you use most — from the tiniest of GIFs and JPEGs to the simplest of JavaScripts and HTML files that you’d quickly open in the Picture Viewer or Notepad — into its esurient entrails, not to be seen for up to ten minutes while its associated application finally opens with a multitude of windows asking you what you’d like to do next. I’d like to see the damn file I tried to open, thank you…

They destroyed a number of popular websites by creating chromeless Flash animations which give you full-page Advertisements inside your current browser window, effectively blocking the majority of content you’re trying to read, and not even your pop-up blocker can stop them…

Good riddance.

It’s pretty clear that Adobe’s going to focus on the creative side, especially merging PDF and Flash. With any luck, they’ll get rid of that ravenous, mangy dog, ColdFusion-MX, and open the door for someone else to write a real CFML server (better yet, a binary interpreter like CLI-PHP!) that doesn’t cost upwards of $1300 Startup and $90K/year in staffing to support it.


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2 Responses to “Adobe Completes Acquisition of Macromedia”

  1. Jeremy Geelan Says:

    Sam you may be interested to read Simon Horwith’s interview today with David Mendels: the news for CF developers from Adobeland is definitely 100% positive!!

    Exclusive CFDJ Interview: Where’s ColdFusion Headed Under Adobe?

  2. Sam Kelter Says:

    I guess they’re stuck of Java, then. [shakes head in dismay] I supopose we’ll just have to wait and see.

    On Pricing, “It is always possible at some time in the future, but you shouldn